just up and leave the country that easily. We had to get them out. The other two men inside that quarantine chamber were the two 7th Squadron soldiers who extracted them from China — two Chinese-American officers named Robert Wu and Chet Li. Wu and Li used to be a part of Echo Unit, one of the five 7th Squadron teams based at Area 7, which was why they were chosen…'
Abruptly, Schofield held up his hand, moved to the front windshield.
'Sorry, Dr. Franklin,' he said, 'but I'm afraid that'll have to do for the moment. I have a funny feeling that things are about to get a little hairy.'
He nodded at the tunnel ahead of them.
At the end of the long concrete tunnel, beyond its rapidly streaking gray walls, was a tiny luminous speck of light — growing larger as they approached it — the familiar glow of artificial fluorescent lighting.
It was the loading dock.
They had arrived at the end of the tunnel.
'Don't go in,' Schfield said to Book. 'They could be waiting for us inside. Stop in the tunnel. We'll walk the rest of the way.'
The bullet-riddled X-Rail train slowed to a halt in the darkness of the tunnel, a hundred yards short of the illuminated loading dock.
Schofield was out of it in an instant — Desert Eagle in one hand, the Football flailing from his waist — leaping down to the concrete next to the tracks. Brainiac, Book II and Herbie followed close behind him.
They ran down the tunnel toward the light, guns up.
Schofield came to the end of the tunnel, peered around the concrete corner.
Brilliant white light assaulted his eyes. He found himself staring at a giant rocky cavern that had been converted into a modern loading dock — a curious mix of flat concrete and uneven rocky surfaces.
Two sets of X-Rail tracks lay on either side of a long central platform. The track on Schofield's side of the platform was empty, while the track on the other side was occupied by another X-Rail train… Botha's.
It lay still, unmoving.
Some black steel cranes ran on wall-mounted rails, leading from the X-Rail tracks to a wide pool of water at the far end of the enormous rocky cavern.
The water in the pool glowed a brilliant aquamarine green, enriched by the minerals of Lake Powell. The pool itself disappeared to the west, winding its way into a twisting black cave that Schofield could only assume led out to the lake. Three ordinary-looking houseboats and a couple of strange-looking sand-colored speedboats bobbed on its surface, tied to the loading bay's concrete dock.
There was one other thing that Schofield noticed about the immense underground loading bay.
It was empty.
Completely and utterly empty.
Deserted.
Schofield stepped cautiously out from the tunnel, and climbed up onto the central platform between the two X-Rail tracks, dwarfed by the sheer size of the cavern.
And then he saw it.
Standing at the other end of the platform, over by the pool of water leading out to the lake.
It looked like some bizarre kind of supermarket display: a small chest-high 'pyramid' of yellow ten-gallon barrels, in front of which sat a chunky Samsonite trunk — black and solid and high-tech. The trunk's lid was open.
As he approached them, Schofield saw that the yellow barrels had words stenciled on their sides.
'Oh, damn…' he said as he read them.
AFX-708: EXPLOSIVE FILLER.
AFX-708 was a shockingly powerful explosive epoxy, used in the famous BLU-109 bombs that had ripped Saddam Hussein's bunkers to shreds in the Gulf War. A 109's super hardened nose would drive down into a solid concrete bunker and then the AFX-708 warhead inside it would detonate — hard — and blow the bunker up from the inside.
With Book II, Brainiac and Herbie behind him, Schofield looked inside the open Samsonite trunk that sat in front of the collection of AFX barrels.
A timer display stared back up at him.
00:19.
00:18.
00:17.
'Mother of God…' he breathed. Then he turned to the others, 'Gentlemen! Run!'
Seventeen seconds later, a bone-crunching explosion ripped through the loading bay.
The cluster of AFX-708 barrels sent a devastating ball of white-hot light shooting out in every direction, expanding radially.
The rock-and-concrete walls of the loading bay cracked under the weight of the explosion, blasting outwards in a million lethal chunks, one entire wall just disintegrating to powder in the blink of an eye. Gunther Botha's X-Rail train — so close to the source of the blast — was simply vaporized.
Schofield never saw it.
Because by the time the explosives went off, he and the others were no longer inside the loading bay. They were outside.
FOURTH CONFRONTATION
The heat hit them like a blast furnace.
Blistering desert heat.
It was everywhere. In the air. In the rock. Against your skin. Enveloping you, surrounding you, as if you were standing in an oven. The complete opposite of the subterranean cool of Area 7 and the X-Rail tunnel.
Out here, the blazing desert sun ruled.
Shane Schofield sped down a narrow water-filled canyon at breakneck speed, blasting through the heat, sitting at the controls of a very odd-looking — but very fast — speedboat.
With him in the boat was Book II, while behind them, in a similar craft of their own, were Brainiac and Herbie.
Technically, Schofield's boat was called a PCR-2 — patrol-craft, river, two-man — but it was more commonly known as a 'bipod,' a small two-man jet-propelled rivercraft built by the Lockheed Shipbuilding Company for the U.S. Navy. The bipod was known for its unique design configuration. Basically, it looked as if someone had joined two small bullet-shaped jet boats with a thin seven-foot crossbeam, in effect creating a catamaran-type vehicle with two pods at either end of the beam. Since both open-topped pods were possessed of powerful twohundred- horsepower Yamaha pump-jet engines, it made for an extremely fast — and extremely stable — boat frame.
Schofield's bipod was painted in desert camouflage colors — brown blobs on a sandy yellow background — and it shot over the water at incredible speed, kicking up twin ten foot sprays of water behind it. Schofield sat in the left-hand pod, driving, while Book II sat in the right-hand one, manning the boat's sinister bow-mounted 7.62 mm machine gun.
The sun shone — burning hot.
It was already 100 degrees in the shade.
'How you guys doing over there?' Schofield said into his wrist mike as he looked back at the other bipod behind him — Brainiac was driving, Herbie sat in the gunner's pod.
Brainiac's voice: 'I'm okay, but I think our scientist friend here is turning green.'
They were speeding down a twenty-foot-wide slot canyon that wended its way southward, toward the main body of Lake Powell.
